To the woman who taught me about the Golden Rule and the Rules of Evidence; how to walk the narrow path of righteousness and how to avoid sentencing enhancements if I didn’t.
My mom and I hiking Letchworth State Park in Upstate New York. She hates pictures; I hate pictures.
For my fifth-grade global history project, I had to create a diagram of the Egyptian social hierarchy. You know, with the pharaoh at the top, then the nobles and priests followed by the scribes and soldiers all the way down to the slaves*.
*I had to Google this to help me remember.
I’d waited until the night before the project was due, then I’d grabbed any posterboard-like item lying around our basement to draw it on. It wasn’t until I finished my presentation and brought the poster back home that I noticed what was written on the back of it:
Exhibit 12A. Timeline for ethylene glycol poisoning.
“What’s that, Mom?”
“Oh, it’s from a trial. To show that what the prosecution was saying about when my client supposedly poisoned her husband with antifreeze didn’t make sense.”
My mom had just gotten home from work. She answered me in between throwing clothes in the dryer, dinner in the oven, and changing into something more comfortable. During my entire adolescence, now that I think back on it, I don’t think I ever saw my mom doing just one thing at a given time.
“Do you think she really poisoned him?”
“Eh, not in the way the prosecution said she did,” my mom replied. “He was an alcoholic, and he physically abused her, so it’s possible that she snapped…”
My mom didn’t just teach me about the Golden Rule of not hurting others. She also taught me about diminished capacity - that sometimes, for example, when we are hurt badly enough and for long enough, we lose our ability to evaluate right and wrong in the clearheaded way that the law requires for full responsibility. She gave me an appreciation for how early life circumstances can affect people’s later behavior and for how some people just seem predisposed toward certain problems.
My mom’s perspective wasn’t the intellectualized, pity-laden point-of-view that many educated, liberally leaning individuals seem to develop.
She told me a story about one of her clients, a career junkie, being charged with stealing two benches from a store. This man was indignant - not that he was facing his umpteenth larceny - but that he had been charged with grand larceny rather than petit larceny.
My mom went to the store and verified that what her client was telling her had been true. The benches had been on sale, and - whatever the cutoff was between grand and petit larceny at the time - her client had made sure that he didn’t steal enough to be charged with a felony.
She laughed as she told me this story and many others like it; she had real appreciation for the resilience, wit, and sometimes even the audacity of the criminals that she defended during the first part of her career.
***
I’ve been in rehab enough to have heard about some true horror-story upbringings. In addition to feeling for whoever was sharing their story, my first response was always: Why am I here with you?
The first 10 or 12 years of my life were halcyon. I lived in a safe, small town where everyone seemed to have their place. We went to my mother’s parents’ and my father’s parents’ houses at least once a week to spend time with aunts and uncles and cousins. We took camping trips to the Adirondacks and vacations to South Carolina, Florida - anywhere with a beach.
My Dad spent every Guy's Night Wednesday sleeping in a small bed with my two brothers and me. We had to lay the “wrong” way on the rectangular bed so that we could all fit, which meant that my dad’s legs hung off the edge cartoonishly.
We went to Yankee Stadium for baseball games. When it became clear that I wasn’t a baseball game kind of guy, my parents tacked on a Broadway show to those trips like it was nothing. I realize now how much work and stress this all must’ve entailed, but in those days, my parents made it look easy.
***
Things changed for our family as my brothers and I entered middle school. There is never a good time for divorce, but middle school has got to be the worst of all. You’re old enough to fully understand what’s at stake after enjoying family togetherness for long enough to take it for granted, but young enough that your personality is still developing and the awkward turbulence of adolescence is still ahead.
My parents did the right things. They talked to us about the changes in our family. My mom bought a house within walking distance of the one that we grew up in, where my dad still lived. We spent even more time with our extended families, which gave us a needed sense of continuity.
Still, as I look back now, I can appreciate how for my parents, who were both Good at Life™, this probably felt like the first full-stop failure of their lives.
Shortly after my parents separated, my dad’s business shut down, and the fallout from this and his later cancer diagnosis would take him the better part of a decade to recover from.
Because of this, during those crucial years, my mom bore the burdens of a single parent in many ways.
She seldom let the stress show.
Her own mother (my beloved grandma, of course), was many wonderful things, but one of these was not an able cook. My mom made sure to put a healthy, delicious dinner in front of her three ravenous boys every single night. Somewhere in between making it through college on athletic scholarships, finishing law school while waiting tables, and then diving headfirst into motherhood, she had taught herself to make crab-and-orzo on asparagus and pasta dishes to rival anything that the Italian side of my family could concoct.
One hard boundary for this blog is that I won’t talk about family members’ mental health struggles, but let me clarify that, while neither of my parents is an addict, there is an extensive family history of addiction on both sides of the family, particularly my mom’s.
So, during the crucial adolescent years, when both my parents were a bit overwhelmed / distracted and OxyContin was so prevalent at parties that kids were walking around with gold and turquoise smudges on their shirts from removing the extended-release coatings from these “hillbilly heroin” pills, some faults had appeared in our family foundation.
Especially when the addictive predisposition is strong, that’s all that addiction needs; it’s like a weed that creeps up through the hairline cracks in your driveway.
***
In many ways, the next 10 to 15 years of my life were a blur, and I hope that they’ll always stay that way.
There were countless family plans interrupted by overdoses, car crashes, or legal incidents. There were three straight years when I was in rehab from my birthday in November through New Year's.
There was a time when I had to kick down the upstairs bathroom door so that my mom and I could give Narcan to another family member who was so blue-gray that I truly thought he was dead already. On that afternoon, my mom handed me the Narcan vial and talked me through the injection process. I hadn’t known that we had Narcan in the house, and if she hadn’t come home from work at just that minute, this family member would’ve been dead. End of story.
That probably sounds crazy to most of you, right? Like something from a movie? Something so traumatic that you’d never forget it? For a few years, that became our family’s normal; there were so many similar incidents that it’s hard to keep track of them all.
There was pawned jewelry and missing cash; late-night errands and suspicious phone calls. My mom always knew what was going on, but she had to wait in dread for the inevitable phone call that started with "Your son..."
I have a memory from I-don’t-know-what year of my mom sitting my brothers and I down a week before Christmas.
“Please, you guys, if we can just make it through Christmas without any major incidents this year…”
My mom isn’t someone who begs. That was as close as she ever got, I think.
Unfortunately, there were times when my mom’s legal background came in handy for her own family, and I can’t imagine how awful that must've been for her. She didn’t have the separation from the justice system that most “normal people” benefit from: She had visited her clients when they were locked up, so she knew full well the dangers, the indignities, the difficulties of getting back on track.
My mom rarely complained. She never faltered. While other parents were watching their kids graduate from college and launch into successful lives of their own, she accepted her lot with a head-down stoicism that speaks to a strength and a love much greater than I can wrap my head around even now.
***
If you met my mom in the grocery store or ran into her at the courthouse today, you wouldn’t guess any of this about her. She looks like any other late-middle-aged mom of three from our small town. She never misses more than a day or two of work each year, and she doesn’t talk about her kids’ problems with her colleagues or even many of her friends.
I decided to write this post after seeing this headline on CNN: Mother of two CEOs and a doctor shares what you should know about raising children.
I rolled my eyes a little bit when I read it; it was a for all the rest of us, there’s Mastercard moment.
American society in particular has such a sore winner mentality. If you didn’t rise up to the top in every area of your life, then it’s because you did something wrong. This is extended to people's children in an especially cruel way.
And I’m not saying that the mother of the three wunderkinds wasn’t a beautiful person. I’m sure she is. Although maybe at least one of the two CEOs will turn out to have paid hush money to a series of transgender prostitutes (just an example).
I’m just saying that our parents can no more protect us from mental illness than they can from physical ones. And that parenting teaches us how to walk through the fires of our lives; it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll avoid them altogether.
In our case, our little family of five ran headlong into the black maw of addiction. In that battle, winning often looks a lot like simply staying alive.
***
I don’t hold out hope of heaven anymore, and I’m sure that our family’s troubles have done a number on my mom’s faith, too. But if there is a heaven, then my mom deserves the TSA PreCheck treatment when she gets there.
In closing, some lines by Frank Bernard Camp:
And when he goes to Heaven,
To St. Peter he will tell:
Another soldier reporting, Sir;
I’ve served my time in hell.
Happy Mother’s Day. Love you, Mom.
To everyone who has lost a son or daughter to addiction, my heart is with you today.
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